That sound in Huntsville today? It was NASA test-firing a piece of rocket history (video)

NASA Saturn V GG testEngineers at Huntsville's Marshall Space Flight Center test fire the gas generator from a Saturn V engine left over from the Apollo space program. The 30,000 pounds of thrust generated by the test just powered the turbines that fed fuel to the massive main engine.

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- NASA isn't leaving much untested as it works on building America's next big deep-space rocket, including parts of the legendary Saturn V engine that carried humans to the moon. On Thursday, the space agency test-fired in Huntsville a gas generator from an original Saturn V F-1 engine that had been stored at the Smithsonian Institution.

The shaky video above shows a little of what it sounded and looked like at one of the "smoke and fire" tests conducted here by Marshall Space Flight Center propulsion engineers since the days of Wernher von Braun. The video is shaky because it was taken by a reporter using a smartphone on a metal viewing stand at Marshall's historic test area. A closer look is below.

The gas generator, shown here generating 30,000 pounds of thrust from its fuel mixture of liquid oxygen and kerosene, was only used to drive the turbopump that actually fed the Saturn V engine. The F-1 itself could deliver 1.5 million pounds of thrust. The gas generator tests were heard around Huntsville, but when NASA tested the F-1s here in the 1960s, the ground shook for miles. Full-scale engine tests are conducted in rural south Mississippi now, partly because of the population growth around the Marshall center.

A new generation of young engineers spent seven weeks taking one F-1 engine completely apart -- a job that included building a custom wrench using Apollo-era drawings -- to get experience and ideas for future engines. Later, Huntsville company Dynetics will take over testing to see if it can validate its idea of using updated F-1s to power later versions of the new rocket being developed in Huntsville.

Propulsion engineer Erin Betts, 31, is one of those young professionals who dismantled one F-1 engine and took a gas generator off of a second one. She described the awe of seeing Apollo-era soot that had rested inside one engine's chambers. "You didn't want to sneeze," she said.

Thursday's test was the last of 11 conducted at Marshall in recent weeks, and a crowd including top military leaders at Redstone Arsenal and U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Huntsville, came out to see it. "This is symbolic," Brooks said after the test. Before long, he said, America will be sending astronauts back into space aboard its own rockets.